Rhythmic shoes and prose: J.W. Marshall captures the ennui of Harborview

Each day during the month of April, KUOW is highlighting the work of Seattle-based poets for National Poetry Month. In this series curated by Seattle Civic Poet and Ten Thousand Things host Shin Yu Pai, you'll find a selection of poems for the mind, heart, senses, and soul.

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rawn from his book "Meaning a Cloud," "The Nightshift Nurse Brought Her Shoes to Work in a Paper Bag" is part of a larger poetic sequence shaped around poet J.W. Marshall's experiences of surviving and recovering from a life-changing injury.

Marshall is author of the poetry collection "Meaning a Cloud" (2008), published by Oberlin College Press, and poetry chapbooks "Taken With" (2005) and "Blue Mouth" (2001), published by Wood Works. He co-authored, with Christine Deavel, the full-length play "Vicinity/Memoryall" (2018), published by Entre Rios Books, and with Ms. Deavel founded Open Books, Seattle’s poetry-only bookstore, in 1995 which they then operated until 2016.

The Nightshift Nurse Brought Her Shoes to Work in a Paper Bag

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nd changed in a narrow room with a bench and a sink and her own yellow locker in a row of yellow lockers for which she supplied her own lock. Lunch and the good shoes locked away until break and then just the shoes until her going home. That someone would steal from a nurse on duty that nurses stole from nurses on duty what the hell was health care after all?

I loved her I guess because there was nothing else which is not to say I didn’t really love her. Because there really was nothing else. The t.v. was nothing and the curtains that did the U around my bed were pointless really because light and noise and just anything at all got past them and because if she didn’t come and talk to me didn’t ask me something thing about me I really think I would not have existed just the furniture there. And I really did love how her professional shoes ached out loud like seagulls in the hall when she walked and that with the phone chimes sometimes and the elevator bell sometimes and sometimes my voice that needed her more that called nurse out to her but I know really wasn’t calling her but was calling nurse because of how calling nurse felt how righteous and pathetic it felt to call nurse from a dark room into a lit hall. What with all that I loved the sound of her shoes the shoes she put on for work that answered me.

"The Nightshift Nurse..." was published by Wood Works, first as a broadside and then in the chapbook Blue Mouth. It was later published in "Meaning a Cloud"(Oberlin College Press).